History of Cryptocurrency

 By market capitalization, Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency. For many people, PTS is synonymous with the word "cryptocurrency". However, the history of virtual money is something more than the history of just one coin.

With the development of information technologies, it becomes possible to process huge amounts of information. Therefore, back in the early 90s of the last century, options for using cryptography in the field of finance began to be discussed. The first person to make a proposal to gradually get rid of traditional money was Timothy May, a well-known physicist who worked at Intel at that time. Soon, his friends Whitfield Diffie and Philip Zimmermann developed a public-key encryption technology, PGP encryption.

In the late 90s, the concept of electronic money Webmoney was developed. Its author was a graduate of the University of Washington, Wei Dai. And although this project never took place, the idea of B-money was liked by the outstanding programmer Nick Szabo. He set himself the goal of creating a virtual currency that can be obtained by doing some work. The job is to solve cryptographic equations, and send the result to other network participants. Despite a number of disadvantages, such as vulnerability to double spending and lack of anonymity, this project already clearly traces the features of modern Bitcoin.

At the same time, Nick Szabo begins to develop the idea of a smart contract. The idea can be explained in simple words as follows: a "smart" contract is a digital contract, the execution of which is possible only strictly in accordance with the information contained in its code. There is no question of trust between the parties to the transaction in such contracts at all.